Will 50-Day Moving Averages Hold Up This Time? (DIA, SPY, QQQQ)

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Yesterday’s major rally may have brought on more than just the garden variety panic buying seen in prior panic buying waves.  So far we have profit taking being seen early on, but the DJIA and the S&P 500 crossed above their respective 50-Day Moving Averages in yesterday’s move.  This is more easy for traders to track in the major ETF’s, so we ran these for the DIAMONDS Trust (NYSE: DIA), SPDRs (NYSE: SPY), and the PowerShares QQQ (NASDAQ: QQQQ).

We flirted with and went above the 50-day moving averages right at the end of December 2008 and held those for a few days in January 2009.  We all know what happened after that.  Crossing over these does not assure additional gains, but with a pullback happening early this morning these 50-day respective moving averages might be the key support levels that need to be tested.  And maybe retested.  Here are the key 50-day moving averages for the INDEX levels first then for the underlying ETF’s of each in order:

………. 50-DAY  YESTERD.
DJIA… 7649.35    7775.86
DIA…..   76.12         77.76
S&P5… 796.06      822.92
SPDR…   82.22        79.27
NDX…. 1176.88     1259.81
QQQQ..   28.91          30.90

What is interesting is that the NASDAQ 100 index has been above the 50-day moving average now for 5 trading days despite some intra-day testing.

If you want to know why we did not include the even more important and more determining 200-day moving averages, the reason for that is rather simple.  Those 200-day averages are so much higher that they would be the signal of a new world if you took out the last two weeks.

Jon C. Ogg
March 24, 2009

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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